According to the Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller, the EU hopes to help the reformers of Iran by the dialogue. The drive to open human rights talks follows the EU’s decision in June to open a Trade and Cooperation Agreement with a regime that has grossly violated and traumatised a nation for the last 23 years.

No sooner had the last of the Shah’s statues been toppled that the voice of moderation was drowned by a clamour for blood and as pressure mounted, extreme elements in the secular left and Islamic radicals called for the systematic elimination of all leading members of the "ancien regime".

Sensing that he might lose control over the terrible forces he had unleashed the grim-faced Ayatollah Roohollah Khomeini ordered Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, a middle-ranking mollah, to execute the enemies of the revolution.

The killings continued for several weeks, drawing horrified protests from the Provisional Prime Minister, Mehdi Bazargan, and from international organisations. For a brief period the shootings were halted until a referendum turned Iran into an Islamic republic. On 7 April another outrage: Amir Abbas Hoveyda, the Shah’s longest serving prime minister was executed.

Iran’s prisons overflowed with thousands of "counterrevolutionaries" many unaware of the charges levied at them. Prisoners fought each other for space and toilet facilities. That spring the International Red Cross was forbidden to visit or aid any prisoners. "All these people should have been killed from the first days instead of crowding the jails", Khomeini declared. Khalkhali toured the country looking for fresh victims.

Army officers, landowners, industrialists, Kurdish rebels, ex-SAVAK agents, diplomats and former politicians were summarily executed. By his own admission, Khalkhali exterminated over 2,000 persons in less than a year. An Islamic judge ordered that four sex offenders, two men and two women, be buried up to the neck and stoned to death. Drug addicts, homosexuals and prostitutes were also dispatched mercilessly.

Fun, laughter and music deserted Iran. Persian culture and historical symbols considered "un-Islamic" were purged.

The intrusion of the revolutionary "komitehs" or committees into daily life proved intolerable. Gangs of ruthless vigilantes invaded the homes of the rich looking for suspects. Magazines, home movies, whisky, opium and even silk underwear were confiscated as evidence of "decadent living" and their owners flogged.

Iranian women marched for their basic freedoms only to be beaten and insulted. Morality squads, the notorious Monkerat, prowled the streets and arrested women for not wearing a hejab, and later a chador, or because they were walking or talking to a man who was not an immediate relative.

The capture of the US Embassy in November 1979 radicalised the situation in favour of Islamic militants. Bazargan and other liberal forces were swept aside and by 1980, Khomeini was on the verge of realising his great ambition – the abolition of secular institutions and the creation of a government based on the Shari’a.

Meanwhile, the human rights situation deteriorated even further to such an extent that President Abolhasan Bani Sadr charged that torture and rapes were taking place in Iranian prisons and that individuals were executed "as easily as one takes a drink of water".

The revolution soon devoured its own children. In June 1981 Khomeini impeached Bani Sadr who fled to Paris along with Mas’ood Rajavi, the leader of the Mojaheddin Khalq in a hijacked aircraft flown ironically by the late Shah’s personal pilot.

In Evin prison, executions of opposition figures in prison stepped up after an explosion that killed over seventy key functionaries of the IRP, including Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti on 28 June, thousands were imprisoned, and at least 100 were executed within two weeks.

The great wheel of terror did not differentiate between kith and kin. It brutalised the whole society. Fifty executions a day became routine. Assassinations avenged executions, triggering further atrocities. Numerous members of the regime lost their lives, while over the months executions of opposition groups rose to several thousands – no one knows the exact figures.

Eight years of war had left Iran with 500,000 dead and countless casualties. By the summer of 1988, when Iran and Iraq ceased hostilities, the ailing Khomeini still found enough strength to order the wholesale massacre of an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 political prisoners including pregnant women and teenagers.

Khomeini’s death in June 1989 made no difference to the state of human rights in Iran. Under Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, state terror continued unabated, as many executions and 80 assassinations of exiled opposition figures took place.

When President Mohammad Khatami came to power in 1997 the West and segments of the population hailed him as a reformer. EU diplomats and the US State Department expressed hope that Iran might be on the way to becoming an "Islamic democracy".

So far this year there have been 292 public executions in Iran, most of the victims hanged from cranes in public squares. And yet for the first time in 20 years there has been no United Nations resolution condemning human rights abuses in Iran.

But the EU has been split over pressuring Iran to adhere to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Short of hypocrisy, the bastions of democracy can no longer ignore the fact that the majority of the Iranian people have distanced themselves from the current regime.

"This theocratic regime is in shambles, coming to the end of its rope", says Fereydoun Hoveyda, senior fellow at the National Committee on American Policy and a former UN ambassador.

Then why deal with this regime? This question has puzzled many Iranians who feel that appeasing the Islamic republic and looking for moderates has only prolonged the inevitable collapse of one of the world’s most repressive regimes.

Ayatollah Ali Khameneh'i, the leader of the Islamic Republic, recently warned that Iran would never accept to become a democracy.

Debating human rights in the abstract can never be an excuse for inaction on the ground. It is neither morally acceptable nor economically wise to believe that closing one’s eyes to abuses opens up opportunities for trade.

Editor’s note: This article was published by "Roozegar No", a monthly Persian language monthly review based in London on its 25 November issue.

Highlights and editing by IPS